The Show-Off (1926 film)

The Show-Off is a 1926 American silent film comedy produced by Famous Players–Lasky and distributed by Paramount Pictures, based on the play of the same name by George Kelly. Directed by Mal St. Clair, the film stars Ford Sterling, Lois Wilson and Louise Brooks.

Are Parents People? marked St. Clair’s initiation into the echelon of top directors at Paramount studios, joining Erich von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch and soon Josef von Sternberg.

It's one of two films that co-starred popular Broadway actor Gregory Kelly (first husband of Ruth Gordon) who died shortly after The Show-Off wrapped production. The film was produced in Philadelphia and New York City thus becoming a sort of time capsule record of buildings long gone and neighborhoods changed.

Plot
A couple, James and Alita Hazlitt, have endured a long, difficult marriage that has oscillated between affection and animosity, intermittently separating and reconciling. Their only child, the teenage Lita, is away at boarding school. Seeking to permanently reunite her beloved parents, she devises a deception. She informs them she is infatuated with a conceited and shallow Hollywood actor. Lita anticipates that her mother and father will join forces in a crusade to save her from a disastrous marriage to this phony “movie sheik.”

A young doctor enters the scene and he and Lita discover they are genuinely attracted to one another. When the young couple find that they quarrel frequently, the doctor explains to Lita that this is indicative of a couple in love. As such, Lita’s parents, too, still love one another. The climax involves a scandal when Lita is suspected of having an affair with the movie star. Guiltless, she takes the blame for her girl friend at the boarding school who had the affair and Lita is wrongly expelled. The Hazlitts become so distressed over Lita’s welfare they become forever reconciled, and their daughter is exonerated.

Cast

 * Ford Sterling as Aubrey Piper
 * Lois Wilson as Amy Fisher Piper
 * Louise Brooks as Clara, Joe's Girl
 * Gregory Kelly as Joe Fisher
 * Claire McDowell as Mom Fisher
 * Charles Goodrich as Pop Fisher
 * Joseph W. Smiley as Railroad Executive

Casting
After Paramount had engaged Florence Vidor to play Mrs. Hazlitt and the 19-year-old Betty Bronson to play her daughter, Lita, director St. Clair personally requested Adolphe Menjou to play the role of her father, Mr. Hazlitt.

Menjou, then aged 35, recalled his reaction in his 1948 memoir It Took Nine Tailors when he was informed he was to play the role of a father figure, rather than a youthful leading man: “If I’m Betty Bronson’s father, then I must have been married at the age of sixteen!” When Menjou discovered the director would be Malcolm St. Clair, who had recently made successful films for Warner Bros. featuring the canine Rin-Tin-Tin, Menjou exclaimed “St. Clair, he’s a dog director!...What are they trying to do, turn me into another Rin-Tin-Tin?”

After a tete-a-tete with the amicable St. Clair, Menjou was reassured as to the seriousness of the production. He would later co-star with Florence Vidor in St. Clair’s The Grand Duchess and the Waiter (1926), a film that, according to Menjou “boosted me to the top rungs of the Hollywood ladder.”

Reception
Dubbing the film “a jolly little comedy,” New York Times film critic Mordaunt Hall, praised director Malcolm St. Clair for getting “the most out of this light story” but cautioned that “he shows an irresistible desire to photograph merely feet, which sometimes is only fairly interesting, while at other times it is quite strained.” Hall praised the performances of Florence Vidor, Lawrence Gray and Betty Bronson, but noted that Adolphe Menjou “is not quite up to his usual high standard, being a little too deliberate.”

Style
Paramount studio’s policies, which “encouraged a good deal of creative freedom” was particularly conducive to St. Clair’s needs as a filmmaker. Are People Parents?, his first project at Paramount, launched “the most important phase of his career.” As in all St. Clair’s sophisticated Paramount comedies, he borrowed cinematic devices termed the “light touch” or the Lubitsch touch. Indeed, the film reflects “the influence of Lubitsch.”

In Are Parents People? inanimate objects trace the deterioration of the Hazlitt marriage. Ruth Anne Dwyer writes: “[I]tems pass back and forth between husband and wife from each their respective rooms. With each progressive passage emotions are implied - fond remembrance, hope, frustration and anger.

St. Clair, in his use of this “subtle” approach to comedy, also makes reference to the notable “newspapers-at-the-table” scene from Lubitsch’s The Marriage Circle (1924), in which Betty Bronson sits at dinner, flanked by her parents, each separated by “a vast expanse of table.” Orson Welles would employ these visual and psychological configurations in his famous sequence from his Citizen Kane (1941).

Theme
St. Clair exposes various middle-class social conventions to satire and “sometimes ridicule” in Are Parents People? with an element of irony favored at Paramount studios.

The central irony of the story arises from the revelation that personal conflicts between couples, who otherwise have affection for each other, is a measure of the depth and resilience of the relationship. The “double plot” traces the senior Hazlitts in tandem with their unmarried daughter and the young doctor who one another. The irony encompasses and transendes age, generation, and marital status:

"[T]he two couples argue, ironically indicating to each other (and to the audience) the degree of their love by the ferocity of their disagreements. The younger unmarried couple demonstrate their mutual affection with verbal jousting, just as the old couple do."

Preservation status
Preserved at the Library of Congress, the film can be found in near mint condition on a Library of Congress related DVD.

Remakes
The film has been remade a number of times:
 * with Hal Skelly and Doris Hill as Men Are Like That (1930).
 * as The Show-Off (1934) with Spencer Tracy, Madge Evans, and Lois Wilson in a different role.
 * as The Show-Off (1946) with Red Skelton and Marilyn Maxwell.
 * On February 2, 1955, a 60-minute version of the play aired on the CBS Television series The Best of Broadway.